This isn’t really a rant, and the title is more of a conclusion I’ve come to through WvW gameplay.
I main a ranger and I know some of you are thinking “conditions should be a problem for you”. I wish you were right, I really do.
So I’ll give you the build I went with for this little test.
Melandru runes + lemongrass.
Pet: Brown Bear
Traits of interest: Keen Edge, Empathic Bond, Shared Anguish, Wilderness Knowledge, Evasive Purity, Survival of the Fittest
Skills: Healing Spring, Lightning Reflexes, Quickening Zephyr, Signet of Renewal, Entangle
So I’ve pretty much spec’ed full out condi removal. In most 1 vs 1 fights, there isn’t an issue. The conditions go on, they come off. Except for Condi Engineers who can spam them faster than I can remove them. Now ignoring the Engineers for a moment, facing just 2 or more opponents and the conditions can not be removed fast enough.
So vs 1 I’m good but vs 2 and they get put on faster than I can take them off. Except when it comes to Engineers, it sounds pretty even right?
Well, it’s not.
There are three stats when it comes to physical damage. Power, precision, and ferocity. There are only two when it comes to conditions. Damage and Duration.
But that isn’t the root of the problem.
Taking the runes and food into consideration, it works off of . So the longer the duration (in seconds), the more the condition is shorted by (in seconds). If condition damage could only be increased by increasing the duration, then the 65 reduction to the time is a direct 65% reduction to the damage.
So rather than stack duration, stack damage instead. This greatly minimizes the reducing effect of the runes + food. It also mean more damage is done between the time it is applied and the opponents ability to remove it.
But wait, it gets worse.
There is no stat on gear for condition duration. There is just condition damage. This leaves two more stats to choose from. So you can take Toughness and Healing Power if you like.
The real issue is with the numbers than can be achieved via condi vs physical. I’ve seen bleeds doing 500 to 750 dmg per second. Poison doing another 250 to 500. Plus torment, burning, etc. All coming from one person. Easily adding up to ~1.5k to 2k damage per second. To get that kind of dps for physical, you are looking at two maybe all three stats for physical. Leaving just one free stat or none at all.
There isn’t an equal trade off. Physical has to trade off damage with tankiness, while condi builds get to do the damage while being tanky.
My suggestion is to reduce the base damage of conditions, and add a ‘condition duration’ stat to the existing gear stat combinations. This way, if they want to get back to the overall damage they were doing before the reduction, they’ll have to pick gear with the ‘condition duration’ stat as well as the ‘condition damage’ stat. Meaning they’ll have to give up some tankiness or physical dps (if Condi/Prec/x).